


Imagine Being a Bird

by Zi_Night



Series: Elia Week [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreams and Nightmares, Elia Fests, Elia Martell Centric, Gen, POV Elia Martell, Running Away, The Sack of King's Landing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:53:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26843932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zi_Night/pseuds/Zi_Night
Summary: Day 5: Elia Lives"Rhaegar was the one who believed in prophetic dreams. Rhaegar was the one who believed in grander plans that their family would be a part of. She was the sensible one. She was the one who focused on the today and the now. He was the one who looked at the future and she was the one who worked on the present to make sure they got there. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that these dreams were warnings."
Relationships: Elia Martell & Jaime Lannister
Series: Elia Week [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950721
Comments: 9
Kudos: 50





	Imagine Being a Bird

It takes some effort to get everyone to go to bed. Rhaenys had been upset about a nightmare she couldn’t verbalize and Aegon, seeing that his sister was upset, had begun to cry in an angry way she’d never heard before. Balerion had quickly joined the ruckus by wailing in the way cats did. It had been a mess of tears and sound so overwhelming that it had taken every shred of her resolve to not join them. Knowing that her daughter was the linchpin of all the crying, she had gathered Rhaenys into her arms, sat on the floor, and whispered soothing nothings until she calmed down. Once Rhaenys calmed down, her kitten followed, and Aegon was persuaded to join them. Even after everyone was calm, they only managed to go to bed by having Rhaenys and Aegon go to bed with her, tucked between her and Mira in her large bed. Rhaenys seemed to believe that, whatever caused her nightmare, couldn’t happen if they were all together.

The whole affair made a deep exhaustion bleed through her bones. She manages to stay awake long enough to make sure her children are settled. She sleeps with Rhaenys pressed against her chest and her hand settled on her daughter’s ribs. Rhaenys and Aegon are curled around each other like little commas, their clasped hands the only point of contact between them. On the other side of Aegon is Mira. The wet nurse had refused to leave when she tried to keep her away from King’s Landing, and it was in moments like these where she was grateful for it. Balerion sleeps in a tiny ball next to her head and she falls asleep to the rise and fall of the kitten’s tiny body.

A few moments after her eyes close, she opens her eyes again. The edges of the room undulate and move in an odd haze, but the space in front of her sharpens in a way that is wholly unnatural. It is the knowledge that this is a dream that keeps her from being afraid at the sight of the woman sitting where Mira should be, but the paralysis in her body keeps her on the edge of unnerved. The woman is seated against the edge of Aegon’s back and she tilts her head to the side to look over her children. The woman has hair like spun gold and sad green eyes that sparkle like emeralds. The woman leans to reach over her children and begins to run her fingers through her hair. The woman’s voice rings through the room as she murmurs, “He’ll kill your children.”

Whatever lull the motherly motion was putting her in instantly dies. “Dash them against the rocks if it will get him what he wants. He’ll kill you too, if he needs to. Or maybe just to settle the score. He never could forgive a slight.” The woman begins to cry. Large, silent, crystalline tears roll down her face and plink like diamonds against some unseen surface. “He’ll kill our boy doing so. He never realized how little he was like him.”

She isn’t sure if it’s the woman’s words or if it’s the fact that she can’t move, but a nauseating desperation takes over her. Her breath shoots out of her in frantic puffs and every muscle in her body strains to move. When tears begin to leak out of her eyes, blurring the image of her children peacefully sleeping, the woman takes her hand out of her hair and runs a finger under her eyes. Even though everything about this woman is sad and gentle, she can’t shake the feeling that this woman doesn’t care about her and her children. That this woman is upset at the potential death of her boy, not theirs.

Her eyes snap open. It is the next morning and her heart feels like it is going to beat out of her chest as she lays there, trying to recover from that dream. Once she gets her heart under control, she pushes herself up on her arm and checks over her family. She could almost cry in relief when she sees that they are fine. Rhaenys and Aegon are still holding on to each other, his little fist swallowed by her slightly larger hand, and Mira is in the same place as when they went to sleep. It is only Balerion who has moved, at some point in the night Balerion seems to have gotten up and is now stretched out at their feet. In the time it takes for everyone else to wake up, the dream completely slips from her mind.

By the time the rest of them wake up she is exhausted, but she puts on a brave face for her children. They were already in scary times; Rhaegar was dead, Aerys was holding them hostage in King’s Landing, and Eddard Stark was coming down to take the city. Her children didn’t need the added stress of seeing that their mother was struggling to get through the days. She doesn’t know if her tiredness comes from her health issues or if it comes from knowing how vulnerable they were, but it doesn’t really matter. There wasn’t much she could do about whatever was making her tired, all she could do was push through it.

They don’t do much of anything today, there isn’t much to do with them all being hostages. They are allowed to wander through the keep but no allowed out of the castle, _a better imprisonment than the one Rhaella got_ , which means that the things they can do are extremely limited. They eat breakfast in a dining hall in the holdfast, alone except for the people left to attend her and her children. After breakfast, they go outside accompanied by the only guard she has left. As she lets her children loose in the gardens, Ser Casimir does a good job of herding Rhaenys to keep her from getting too far from them.

Rhaegar had taken just about all the fighters in King’s Landing when he went to go face Robert Baratheon, including her guard. Her uncle had chosen Ser Casimir to stay behind because the man was dutiful, a skilled fighter, and courteous in a way that was necessary in King’s Landing. Still, if the city was sieged there wasn’t much Ser Casimir could do for them by himself.

After eating lunch in the garden, they head back into the holdfast. Her children need to be carried back in, Mira carries Aegon because it is close to the boy’s nap time and she carries Rhaenys in because her daughter ran herself into exhaustion. She tries to write letters to her brothers while her children nap, but she can’t think of anything reassuring to say. She abandons her blank sheet of paper once her children wake up and takes them to the playroom.

Their play today is inspired by one of Ser Casimir’s stories of when he would go fishing with his father as a child. Rhaenys builds a boat out of blocks around her brother and hands him one of Balerion’s toys, a stick with a string attached to it. Balerion does a very good job of being the fish they are trying to catch.

They pass the rest of the day without issue, until it is time for them to go sleep. Having learned her lesson from last night, she makes no attempt to get them to sleep in their own beds. But even with them all in the same room Rhaenys seems agitated. “We can’t stay here mama.” Rhaenys pulls at her skirt with desperate urgency. “We can’t stay here. Monsters are coming.” She intends to soothe Rhaenys’s concerns, to say some placating words about the security of the holdfast and how monsters aren’t real, but then she remembers her dream. The discomfort of it. The very real threat she felt from the dream.

Rhaegar was the one who believed in prophetic dreams. Rhaegar was the one who believed in grander plans that their family would be a part of. She was the sensible one. She was the one who focused on the today and the now. He was the one who looked at the future and she was the one who worked on the present to make sure they got there. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that these dreams were warnings and she knew that there were people coming to siege the castle. She takes a deep breath, put her hands on Rhaenys’s cheeks, and tells her, “If we need to get out of here I will get us out of here. But that won’t happen tonight. Give me time little sun.” _Rhaegar is dead, maybe someone else needs to act for the future._

It is enough to pacify Rhaenys for the night. The rest of her family goes to sleep in a similar arrangement as the night before, but she finds herself awake long after everyone else is asleep. Getting out of the castle was easier said than done.

As she thinks, she remembers a time when Jaime had been free of the king, he had come with them to the gardens. Rhaenys had raced through the trees picking up leaves and Aegon had been taking hesitant steps in the grass. After her children had tired and decided to take a nap outside, she had looked up at some birds overhead and said, “Imagine how nice it would be to fly wherever you please.”

Jaime had been quiet for a long while before asking, “Have you ever thought about it?”

She knew what he was actually asking, even if most of his question remained unsaid. _Have you thought about escaping this place?_ There was something dangerous about what he was asking. About admitting to wanting to slither out of the cage that was supposed to be her home. “I wouldn’t know how.”

He had shrugged with a casualness his body had not shared. “There is a way to reach the bay from the keep. A door through the wall that is almost always unmanned because it leads out to a cliff. A climbable cliff. Once you’re out, it’s only a question of how quickly you can get where you want to go.” The details of his response had made her wonder how much thought he had actually put into it. _How long has he sat on this information and how tempted was he to use it?_

“Where would you go?”

Jaime had opened his mouth, but then said nothing. His face had gone through a complicated journey as he thought. _I guess he hasn’t thought about it that much._ Eventually, he whispered to her, “I don’t know.”

He had sounded devastated by the realization that he doesn’t know. By the realization that the answer was not as clear as he wanted it to be. “I think I would go to Starfall,” she had said in the hopes of distracting him, “before trying to make my way home.” He had seemed to understand that, for her, home was Sunspear and he doesn’t seem to judge her for it.

In the morning, she sends Mira around that way to see if she can find the door. The castle was undermanned after Rhaegar had taken the fighting men and Mira was a subtle woman, checking the exit Jaime suggested was the least of her problems. It was what came after that she had to think through. There was still the question of what they were going to do once they got to the bay and how getting into the bay became getting to Dorne.

She heads down to the library to plan. It is a room she has not been in since their stay after Rhaenys’s birth. Rhaegar would usually spend long swaths of time in the library trying to escape his father, she would come down here with Rhaenys to remind him to come out for sunlight. She remembers him pouring over thick, ancient tomes and letters sealed with black wax. She wasn’t here for anything like that.

She builds Aegon a little nest to rest in and gives Rhaenys paper and drawing utensils. She hunts down maps of the nearby areas and spreads them over a table. She looks over rivers and towns and terrain. She measures out distances and calculates travel times based on travel methods. She estimates how much her hypotheticals would cost and tries to think of her jewels and if she has the money to pay how much the routes could cost. She only leaves once her children begin to complain about being hungry and she, just slightly, understands how Rhaegar could have lost so much time down here.

They go back to the holdfast to eat. Mira meets them in the courtyard and confirms Jaime’s door. They eat their food and then she asks Mira to watch her children. She asks Casimir to meet her out on one of the balconies of the holdfast. The knight is kind enough not to question why she wanted to meet here. Instead he stands and waits for her to speak.

“Casimir, what have you heard about the oncoming siege?”

“There have been rumors among the guards,” he reports, “that troops have been seen a week’s march away. Maybe a week and a half at most, but it is unlikely.” That is much closer than Eddard Stark’s army should be. The news settles into her stomach like coal.

“Do you think you could get out of the city?”

For the briefest of moment’s his lips purse, no doubt he though she was planning on sending him away to save him, but he answers her anyway. “I could. The guards of the castle do not remember my face and the Goldcloaks have no reason to stop me.”

She takes the bracelets off her wrist. They had been a gift from Rhaegar, given to her on her first birthday after they were married. “If you leave today, could you get a boat big enough for four and have it ready before the week is over? Could you camp with it near the mouth of the Blackwater Rush on the eastern side of the castle?” Casimir looks at her carefully, as though trying to see if she was serious about her talks of treason.

She feels nothing when she drops her bracelets into Casimir’s extended hand. “To what end?”

“You said you were a fisherman, like your father, before you were a knight. That you used to row up and down the Scourge because the best fish were upriver. Getting near Tumbleton will be difficult, but one step must be taken before the next.”

“I shall make sure to prepare adequate supplies.” He pockets her bracelets and dips into a bow. “With your leave, princess.”

Once Casimir is gone all there is left to do is prepare and wait. Their best chance of disappearing was as the siege began. There weren’t enough guards to keep watch over her now but the servants were around to keep an eye on her. Once the city was being sieged, it would be easy to slip away in the chaos and it would take people a while to notice that they had disappeared, _hopefully long enough for us to well away_. It was risky to wait that long but she didn’t think there was a better option. _We are long past ideal situations._

Most of the preparations are easy. Taking her wealth with them wasn’t an issue because between her and Mira they would have no issue wearing it out. She trusted Casimir to gather the food and camping supplies they may need for travel. There was no need to travel with more than a few sets of outfits. They would be buying anything they needed so she wasn’t too concerned about forgetting something. Getting out of the holdfast wouldn’t be that hard either, just mentioning Aerys’s name was enough to keep people from asking too many questions. The hardest thing she had to prepare for was something she couldn’t really prepare for at all.

Climbing out of here was the thing that worried her the most. She used to climb quite a bit with Oberyn, but that had been a decade ago back when they were children. And she had never done it while dealing with the weight of a child on her. Mira had suggested using a sling to help manage her children’s weight but they had no way of testing if that would be enough to help make getting down easier. They prepare their things as much as they dare and anxiously wait.

Whatever guards Casimir had gotten his rumors from were frighteningly accurate. A week after she sent Casimir off, the castle begins to grow hectic with news of the siege. The servants murmur about it for hours, but it is fully confirmed for her once she begins to see fire rising from the city. It is much too soon for the invaders to be inside the city and it makes all her preparations feel a lot less paranoid. _Them already being in the city makes it so that it is a matter of when the keep will fall, not it._

She and Mira surreptitiously gather all the things they prepared. They slip on jewelry, hide satchels under their skirts, and wrap sashes around their waists. She grabs Rhaenys’s hand, who has her cat tucked under her other arm, and Mira gathers Aegon in her arms. She casts one last look around her room before head out of the holdfast.

Like she predicted, using Aerys’s name like a threat keeps them from being questioned on getting out of the holdfast. Servants quickly lower the drawbridge to let them out and rush away to hide after pulling it back up. The courtyard is empty when they step out of Maegor’s Holdfast and quiet like the a grave. Mira takes the lead once they are outside, since she is the one who knew where the door was.

Mira walks them over into a sunken courtyard near the wall. It takes them right by the White Sword Tower and she feels something anxiously buzz in her fingertips. “Mira,” she says, pulling the other woman to a stop, “can I ask you a favor?”

“What is it, princess?” She shouldn’t ask her this. She shouldn’t do anything that delays them and risk their escape. She still can’t shake the feeling that she needs to do this.

She pulls a scrap of paper from her skirt. “Can you run this to Ser Jaime’s room? There shouldn’t be anyone there to notice you.” She hadn’t thought about it before saying it, but the realization that Jaime had been alone in that tower for weeks pulls at her heart. _From Aerys to isolation to Aerys again. There is no way he is doing well._ It hardens her resolve to get this paper into his room.

Mira doesn’t question her, she just hands over Aegon before racing off with the paper. Logically, she knows that the tangent takes Mira no time at all, but it feels like an eternity. It is long enough for doubt to set in. _What if we can’t climb down this cliff? What if Casimir is not there? What if we cannot make it out of the crownlands? What if leaving this note gives us away? What if that dream wasn’t a warning, but a premonition? What if there is no avoiding being dashed on the rocks?_

Mira does not have the same crisis of faith that she does. Once the girl comes back she drags her and Rhaenys through a heavy door past the courtyard. They walk through dark hallways, go down a dusty set of stairs, end up at another door, walk in the space between the castle walls, and then end up outside. She makes sure to keep a tight hold on Rhaenys’s hand all the while, but if that hold is for her or her daughter’s sake she does not know.

The cold, salty air of the bay on her face makes her sick with hope. A part of her wants to stop and breath, but the faster they were away from this place the better their chances were. She lets go of Rhaenys’s hand to check the cliff, she was the one experienced in climbing and it would be her responsibility to see if this was manageable. She can see handholds and lips, but also sees an irregularity that is wholly unnatural. She gets down on her belly to check the cliff, completely unbothered that it is making her dress dirty, and feels over the edge.

“I think there is a ladder of sorts here. It should make it easier to get down.” She has never once thought positively of Maegor the Cruel, but he is the only king paranoid enough for something like this and she thanks him for it. Mira helps her tie the sling for Aegon and she makes sure that Mira’s sling for Rhaenys is secure. If her daughter is afraid it does not show in her face. Rhaenys’s dark violet look at her solemnly, her little hands clasped over a ball of black fur, and she so desperately wants everything to be alright. “I’ll go down first,” she tells Mira. If the ladder stopped before they were all the way down she would be better at finding a path down.

Once she is clinging to the cliff side, she looks down. It was something she and Oberyn had trained themselves to be able to do, a test in conquering fear. It didn’t make it any less scary to stare down a fall that would definitely kill her, but that training helped her keep moving. _It is never wrong to be afraid, but you should not let fear diminish you,_ it was a lesson she had almost forgot while being under Aerys’s thumb. It was a lesson she hoped she would be able to teach her children.

Both she and Mira are huffing by the time they reach the bottom. She hadn’t had much in the way of physical activity in over a year so doing this with her son on her back was too much. Mira was a hale and healthy young woman, but Rhaenys was a three-year-old girl with all the weight that entailed. They can hear the crashing of waves down here and they take bracing breaths of the salt filled air.

The crunching of steps startles them both straight. Her heart jackrabbits in her chest at the sight of a figure approaching them. Once the man walks into view, she finds herself impressed by how little Ser Casimir looked like a knight when out of his armor. “The boat is south of here,” he says as he takes both her children into his arms. “We should hurry off before the troops get the chance to circle this way.”

By the grace of the Mother, her plan goes off without a hitch. They pile into Casimir’s boat without issue. She and Mira bind up their hair and huddle her children between them as Casimir rows them upriver towards Tumbleton. They camp alongside the Blackwater Rush on the way, with the adults alternating watch through the night. From Tumbleton they sell their boat and buy overpriced horses. They ride down to Grassy Vale from Tumbleton and then head down to Ashford. Each destination they reach makes something untense in her chest. No one seems to recognize her, and no one questions their urgency. They weren’t unusual in being people that were trying to escape the war. The further they get the more it feels like they might make it to Dorne.

On the stretch between Grassy Vale and Ashford, they spot a racing rider. When they first spot the rider, they suspect they may be a messenger because a lone rider at a gallop usually meant a messenger. Only messengers could afford to ride their horses that hard because they could trade their horses off for free in any town they crossed. The closer the rider gets, the easier it gets to see them, the more they think they are right. The horse looks too fresh for the speed they are riding at and the rider looks too rumpled for how fresh the horse looked. It doesn’t keep Casimir from keeping his dagger at the ready.

When the rider gets closer, she waves Ser Casimir down. His golden locks look unkempt, but they are still recognizable. She dismounts her horse and waits for the rider to reach them. There was a chance this wasn’t good news, that he wasn’t here to help them, but she felt safe in this risk.

Once he is near, Ser Jaime jumps off his horse with a manic look she recognizes most from Rhaegar. He doesn’t look well. His clothes are rumpled and stained, his eyes are bloodshot, his hair is windblown and tangled, and there is a decent amount of subtle on his cheeks. His eyes dart from her to Rhaenys to Aegon before he moves forward to crush her in a hug. She doesn’t get the chance to hug him back because he pushes off and says, “Starfall. You said you would go to Starfall.” He reaches into his belt and pulls out a crumbled note. She can see the slightly smudged phrase she wrote on the note, _imagine being a bird._

“It is good to see you.” A part of her wants to ask him what happened. There is no way Aerys won the siege and she doesn’t see why Robert Baratheon or Eddard Stark would let Jaime leave, but she doesn’t ask. Now doesn’t seem like the time. Not when it doesn’t seem like he is here to drag them back. Not when she can almost taste freedom in the air.

“It is good to see you, all of you.” He waves at Rhaenys and she waves at him. The gesture makes her feel more confident that Jaime didn’t mean them any harm.

“You are free to join us, if you’d like.”

“I-“ Jaime hesitates for a moment. His face flushes with what she thinks is shame before he looks down. “I don’t think I should. Elia, I killed Aerys.” _Well that answers why they might let him leave,_

She puts her hands on Jaime’s cheeks and forces her to look at her. She thinks of Rhaella and how she had been a princess locked in a tower her whole life, she thinks of her uncle who was forced to die to save her life, she thinks of her children and the fear she felt for their lives, she thinks of herself and all the remarks she had to bite her tongue against, she thinks of Jaime with all his innocence lost, she even thinks of Rhaegar with his paranoia and how he hadn’t really know affection, and says, “ You shouldn’t have been the one forced to do it, but it is what he deserved.” Jaime looks at her with disbelief and then thinks about how he didn’t know where he would go if he managed to escape. “The offer still stands, you can come with us if you want. Regardless of who you killed.”

Jaime looks at her for a long while. His green eyes glassy with some emotion. “You all are heading to Starfall?”

“We are.”

Jaime nods his head. “I’ll go with you. But I think there is a stop we should make along the way. I think I know where the rest of the Kingsguard has been.”


End file.
